"I wanted to take what is essentially a very nice experience, but play it up — cartooned it, if you would — to show off all the paranoia and the angst that a kid goes through and put it more in a fantastic world."

Cult hero, curmudgeon and cartooned memoirist, Harvey Pekar leapt from the pages of his decades-running comic book "American Splendor" to the big screen in this 2003 adaptation of his work, which recounted the travails of jazz-loving clerk at a Veteran's Administration hospital in Cleveland.

The more comforting option is to remember the English as they were once cartooned – insular, boastful and proud of their terrible food – and see these qualities blazing instead out of Madrid, Paris and Berlin.